Thursday, July 18, 2013

Emotional Starvation: a mother's legacy

The other
day I caught a glimpse of myself in a store window and I thought I was looking
at my mother! When did that happen? For several years now I have heard her voice
coming out of my mouth, but I’ve also heard my voice coming from my daughter’s
mouth as she interacts with her own daughters!
What is it about mothers and daughters that causes them to perpetuate
and repeat the patterns and behaviors of the past?

As I
continue my work on the final chapters of my book, I have begun to ask myself,
“What’s the point?” By that I mean what would encourage a reader to say,
“That’s interesting. I’d like to know
more.” What I hope the reader will take away as a result of all my reading,
thinking, research and writing is that the mother-daughter relationship is a
mirror reflection of the culture of the times and the emotional condition women
and girls are living in.

I began
the book with a question, a puzzle that I didn’t understand but wanted to, and
a vague sense of what an answer might look like. Why is it that although the
women in my family were bright and highly educated, they chose partners in life
who were needy and led them into a life of poverty and/or abuse? Why was this
pattern repeated over so many generations? I hoped that out of my early
research there would emerge a solution-- an idea that seemed promising. So I
started writing to see whether I could build a story that would illustrate and
shed light on the puzzle.

One of the strongly held
themes I discovered was that selflessness by the women in my family was treated
as a badge-of-honor that they had learned to wear proudly. Each woman had experienced
a change in their understanding of their roles in life. As each one chose a life partner, they silenced
themselves from being strong, independent women to women who accepted invisibility
and a belief that caring for others and not herself was “a woman’s lot in
life”. And each had passed this sense of invisibility on their
daughters.

As I wrote, I saw in front
of me, as if projected on the wall, a time-line of all the abusive experiences,
events and emotional neglect my grandmother and mother had experienced. I say and even felt how each of them had
suffered life-stripping emotional neglect because no one had asked them what
they needed or felt. I also felt how
each of them had survived this silence and invisibility by learning to believe
that it was a normal state for women.

Our emotional needs are the
bedrock of our ability to know ourselves, take care of ourselves, know what is
right, set boundaries, be authentic and visible in our relationships, and
importantly, protect ourselves from abusive people. Silencing women’s and
girls’ emotional needs is the same as sentencing women and girls to lives of
emotional starvation, invisibility, inequality, and being set-up for abusive
relationships.

I began to see how the emotional neglect and
invisibility had shaped not just their relationship with themselves, but how it
had shaped their relationship with each other. I saw how their shared
experience of emotional deprivation had created an emotional hunger in the
mothers that they then passed on to their daughters. They didn’t know the words
to say or how to feel entitled to claim ownership for their needs or their
right to feel heard, visible, and nurtured. This understanding was as foreign
to these women as a language they did not understand or had even heard of. Not
having anywhere to be emotionally fed, and not knowing how to feed themselves
or that they could ask to be responded to, each mother had passed their
feelings of emotional starvation on to their daughters.

This left their daughters feeling
the same invisibility and emotional neglect that their mothers had felt. It
left the next generation of daughters spending their childhood and adult years
learning about what others needed rather than learning about what they needed.
The mothers had passed on to their daughters their own complete oblivion that
something essential was missing. In their flurry to care for others, the
daughters did not realize that their own emotional needs were missing and that
they didn’t know the language or own the sense of entitlement to claim their
needs. Just like their mothers, they did not recognize how emotionally starved they
were and that they had learned to accept emotional starvation as normal. In
this starved state, they also did not recognize how dangerous it is to be
disconnected from your emotional needs. They did not understand that not
feeling entitled to ourselves leaves women (and men) vulnerable to being and
accepting abusive behavior from others.

Emotional starvation occurs
when our basic need to feel important to others is not met. We all need
emotional support. It helps us to feel
that our life has meaning beyond our jobs and tangible accomplishments. We are
most satisfied when we feel that our hopes, dreams, feelings and desires are
loved and appreciated. Emotional starvation occurs when people allow
circumstances to bind them so tightly into responsibility roles that no time is
available for intimate communication. Focused intimate conversation looks more
like taking a quiet walk while you talk privately and listen intently to each
other away from the hassles and responsibilities of daily life. It takes place
at a slower pace than other forms of communication and it is not outcome
driven. There is no final goal to achieve.
The sole purpose derives from the process itself. For those involved, it is enough to feel
symbolically connected via the sharing of their experiences.

When there is almost no
time spent in intimate communication, a bonded relationship will start to
dysfunction because emotional needs are not being met. Most women like to view themselves as more
autonomous than they really are. As a consequence, they underestimate or even completely
eclipse their own emotional needs from their awareness. It’s as if a person is
starving but has no hunger! When this is happening, most people will turn the
hurt into feelings of resentment and anger. They become hypersensitive and
anger is provoked by even small issues.

In my book this phenomenon
is illustrated in the lives of the three predominant women in the story. They
act as though they do not have emotional needs.
They act stronger than they really feel underneath, and thus, reinforce
the deprivation. Because they do not
expect emotional support, they do not ask for it, consequently, they do not get
it. They also choose significant others who cannot or do not want not give
emotionally. They often choose partners
who are cold, aloof, self-centered, or needy, and therefore likely to continue
to deprive them emotionally.

Because their emotional
needs were never met, the women in my story are not even aware that they are
emotionally deprived. They suffer from depression, loneliness and other
physical symptoms, but never make the connection with the absence of nurturing,
empathy and protection. As a result, they deny that their needs are important
or worthwhile and believe that strong people do not have needs. They consider it a sign of weakness to ask
others to meet their needs and have trouble accepting that there is a “lonely
child” inside them who wants and needs love and connection from others in their
lives. I hope my characters can learn to find the balance between strength and
vulnerability in life. To only have one
side--to only be strong--is not to be fully human and denies a core part of who
they are as people.

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About Me

Wanda Pyle grew up on a farm in the Flint Hills of Kansas and draws upon this background in much of her writing. She is currently living with her husband in Claremont, California. She enjoys reading, writing and spending time with her grandchildren. Her debut novel chronicles the lives of three generations of women through economic hardship, war, and eventually, self-reliance. She is currently at work on her second novel.